Doctoral Dissertation Research: Assessing anthropogenic impacts on endangered primates

由于栖息地的丧失和人类活动的增加，世界各地的各种物种都濒临灭绝。研究需要超越目前对保护区的关注，转向其他人类改造的景观，以确定野生动物和人类如何共存。这个博士论文项目结合了行为，生态，人口统计和遗传数据，从一个濒危的狐猴物种，生活在与人类共享的景观，以评估这个物种是如何受到人类活动的影响。除了进一步了解人类-狐猴动态，该项目还将为野生动物生物学家和保护区管理人员提供一个模型，以更广泛地调查人类-野生动物动态。作为该项目的一部分，调查人员将培训学生实地和实验室技术，包括行为数据收集，野生动物调查，DNA提取和扩增。此外，该项目将有助于公共科学推广，国际研究合作和灵长类动物保护。研究人员将对人类活动对威洛狐猴生态的影响进行精细分析，包括这种狐猴物种如何应对干扰以及哪些类型的人类活动最具威胁性。行为，人口和地理数据将收集生活在不同程度的人类干扰地区的狐猴。这些调查将集中在Bezà Mahafaly特别保护区，这是马达加斯加西南部最近扩大的保护区，包括核心保护区以及受管制的人类使用区。在更大的景观尺度上，调查人员将调查贝萨地区未受保护的森林片段，并利用粪便DNA进行景观遗传分析。这些分析将确定狐猴如何在人类主导的景观中移动，以及狐猴种群的结构如何受到人类土地使用模式的影响。最后，研究人员将联合收割机从贝萨的核心狐猴种群的长期人口统计数据与狐猴进出保护区的数据相结合，以预测种群未来的增长和稳定性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Diverse species worldwide are endangered because of habitat loss and increased exposure to human activities. Research is needed that moves beyond the current focus on protected areas to other human-modified landscapes to determine how wildlife and humans can coexist. This doctoral dissertation project combines behavioral, ecological, demographic, and genetic data from an endangered lemur species that lives in a landscape shared with humans, to assess how this species is affected by human activities. In addition to furthering knowledge about human-lemur dynamics, the project will provide a model for wildlife biologists and managers of protected areas to investigate human-wildlife dynamics more generally. As part of this project, investigators will train students in field and laboratory techniques, including behavioral data collection, wildlife surveys, and DNA extraction and amplification. Further, the project will contribute to public science outreach, international research collaborations, and primate conservation. The investigators will conduct a fine-scale analysis of the impacts of human activities on the ecology of the Verreaux's sifaka, including how this lemur species responds to disturbances and which types of human activities are most threatening. Behavioral, demographic, and geographic data will be collected for sifakas living in areas subject to differing degrees of human disturbance. These investigations will be focused at Bezà Mahafaly Special Reserve, a recently expanded protected area in southwest Madagascar that includes core conservation areas as well as areas of regulated human use. At a larger landscape scale, investigators will survey unprotected forest fragments in the Bezà region and conduct landscape genetic analyses, using fecal DNA. These analyses will determine how sifakas move across the human-dominated landscape and how the structure of the sifaka population is influenced by patterns of human land use. Finally, investigators will combine long-term demographic data from the core sifaka population at Bezà with data on sifaka movement into and out of the reserve to predict the population's future growth and stability.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.